Category Archives: Episodes

One of the tragic side-effects of the civil war in Syria is that it has produced a mass migration of refugees and other displaced populations. For some, it isn’t even the first time they’ve had to abandon home: The U.N. recently reported that 71,000 Palestinian refugees have fled Syria for Lebanon. This massive reshuffling of populations will pose long-term problems in the region for years to come.

Underlying these problems is the issue of occupancy rights. That, why do we have the right to live in a particular place, and what are we owed when those rights are violated? If the Palestinians have a right of return, what’s the basis of that right? Does it hold the same for second-generation refugees as for first?

Our guest today, Anna Stilz, has a theory of occupancy rights that attempts to settle these questions. Stilz is an assistant professor of politics at Princeton University.

The irony of immigration policy is that most of its targets—all the people outside a given state’s borders—have no say in it. Yet border regimes play a critical role in determining individuals’ life chances. Real democracy, says Arash Abizadeh, means giving a say to those subject to coercively enforced rules of such importance. In other words, Abizadeh argues, democracy means immigration policy can’t simply be set unilaterally.

How can the state protect us from harms that haven’t happened yet? It may be clear that a terrorist or sex offender, for instance, intends to cause harm long before he has actually committed acts of violence. We could try to convict him in criminal court, but by definition, he hasn’t yet caused the harm we’re worried about. So how can we blame and punishment him? We could also try civil law, but civil suits come with a lower burden of proof that doesn’t seem quite right when we consider taking away a person’s liberty.

Our guest today, Kim Ferzan, thinks the answer is to create a third category, preventive justice, that can be used to legally impose restrictions on people who intend to cause harm.Continue reading →

How should states deal with hate speech? The American approach is to protect even the most vile speech. In other liberal democracies, especially in Europe, hate speech is more restricted, and permitting unconstrained speech is seen as a failure to respect the groups it targets. Our guest today, Corey Brettschneider, thinks a third way is possible.

In thinking about the rules of war, the trend in contemporary political philosophy has been to start from individual conduct and scale up. War is just many instances of individual self-defense, so the rules about individual self-defense will frame the principles of just warfare. Our guest today, Jon Quong, wants to flip that on its head. To understand whether a given individual is acting rightly in harming another, we need to first settle our views about the social context in which it takes place.

There is very little any given individual can do to address climate change. How, then, can individuals have a duty to act on carbon emissions? Our guest today, Garrett Cullity, sees a paradox here. He sees a problem drawing a line from collective responsibility for climate change to individual responsibility. Fortunately, Cullity also has a better solution for morally motivating individuals.

The claim that illegal downloading is stealing has been a mainstay of the entertainment industry’s campaign against music, movie and software piracy. But especially among young people, this idea doesn’t hold much sway. Downloading an illicit MP3 seems like a different kind of wrong from car theft. On this episode of Public Ethics Radio, Stuart Green says that property law has fallen out of sync with people’s underlying moral values. Continue reading →